Interrupt (35 page)

In the frantic hours before the pulse, all of this data had been reconsidered by specialists equipped with new theories posed by astronomers like Marcus.

Contamination disguised a lot of the clues they’d sought. Even the deepest ice was subjected to thermal heat, churn, exposure, and recompression. Throughout the past decade, as laser spectrometry allowed for ever more precise analysis, many researchers had doubted their own findings or were ridiculed or ignored—but the ice didn’t lie. The ice didn’t care about publishing, funding, or politics.

Nitrates filled the ice from prehistory all the way through its oldest layers. The story told on the ocean floors was even more uncompromising.

Some rocks, like basalt, were slightly magnetic. In 1963, a geophysicist named Lawrence Morley noted that although rocks on the planet’s surface appeared to have been randomly magnetized, this was an illusion caused by erosion. Beneath the oceans were lava beds preserved from upheaval or decay, which, as they cooled, had been magnetized in lines consistent with the direction of Earth’s magnetic field.

Modern-day equipment had found hundreds of anomalies in the basalt. There were subtle distortions caused by geomagnetic storms much like cold and heat affected the growth rings in trees.

These distortions weren’t well-documented. It wasn’t a mystery that had been glamorous enough to draw young minds, much less a lot of money, and yet NOAA had cobbled together a preliminary model and sent it out before communications ended. Other people would have this data, too. For all the good it did them, the human race had come close to recognizing the peril before it struck.

“Maybe now we know what happened to the dinosaurs,” Marcus said. “But some of us will survive.”

Not you. Not in this place.

“We can adapt,” he said.

Cold-blooded life forms, especially large ones, would be especially vulnerable to the pulse, and no one had fully explained why the giant reptiles disappeared so abruptly.

There were competing theories about the dinosaurs’ extinction; the Chicxulub meteor strike; years of darkness brought on by worldwide
volcanic eruptions; the rise of small mammals who fed on dinosaur eggs. What they knew for certain was that at the end of the Cretaceous period, the only species to move forward were small birds, small mammals, burrowing reptiles like lizards and snakes, and creatures able to hide underwater like frogs, turtles, sharks, and fish.

That would mean the sun had been calm for eons while the dinosaurs ruled supreme, and perhaps that it had flared on and off again for thousands of years more.

Rapid climate change was only the beginning of what the pulse would do to Earth. As the warming oceans filled the atmosphere with rain, geomagnetic stresses would cause volcanic activity on a massive scale, adding ash and smoke to the swelling cloud cover. Plummeting temperatures would have doomed the great reptiles even as the cold enabled fur-bearing mammals.

Then the Earth had warmed again. Some mammals returned to the ocean. Why? To escape a new period of flares? Dolphins, whales, and seals were land animals that had evolved back into the water, losing their hair in the cases of the dolphins and whales, growing flippers over their five-fingered hands, yet never quite escaping the surface due to the lungs they’d developed in the open air.

Regular pulses might also explain why early humans appeared to have been stuck in a series of evolutionary ruts despite having a skull capacity equal to that of modern man.

As someone who was fascinated with history, anthropology, and the rise and fall of civilizations, Marcus knew this was the big question. Why had
Homo sapiens
taken so long to become what they were today?

For uncounted millennia, men had been brutes with the most simple tools and societies. Then in the space of four thousand years, they’d built empires and cities and wrapped the entire world in electrical grids, highways, agriculture, shipping lanes, and aircraft. They’d begun to understand the stars and the cosmos.

Too late.

Ignoring his thirst, restlessly adjusting his blanket on the floor, Marcus felt a sad, bitter irony.

He might die in this room, but his race would carry on. In fact, he believed the inconstant sun had pushed humankind in ways they barely realized. They owed their intelligence to sudden variations in Earth’s climate, unknowingly responding to a cycle much larger than their own lives.

The geological record showed that Africa, the cradle of life, had been a lush jungle for two hundred million years. In that unchanging environment, the first crude primates had been a viable but static part of the biosphere.

Then something happened. The jungle became grasslands, which became desert, which grew into savannahs again. Huge lakes covered the land, then disappeared in more droughts until another volcanic apocalypse cooled the planet and Africa was swept by monsoons and new forests.

All of this occurred in two hundred thousand years, a very short period by evolutionary standards. The pressure to adapt had been unimaginable. Humanity’s ancestors were those who
could
change. The survivors became problem solvers, tool users, and omnivores. Everyone else had died.

Using mitochondrial DNA, biologists thought they could trace every living person to a single female in 140,000 B.C. Doing the same with Y chromosome DNA, they found a single male between 60,000 and 90,000 B.C.

Repeated extinction events like the Toba supervolcano had lowered the human population to a few thousand individuals worldwide. From them, only one family line had persisted. One. That was how close
Homo sapiens
had come to annihilation, and it had happened at least twice.

Everything that made them great—their creativity, their initiative, and their persistence—stemmed from the need to outwit the next disaster.

They were a heroic species.

Most of them were doomed. Whatever was left of humankind would need to dig into the Earth, deep down, building new cities beneath the surface. They would be forced to give up the sky and everything else they considered their birthright.

“But someone might find your notes,” Marcus said. “You can still help.”

He wanted to recopy the messiest parts. He also hoped to miniaturize his handwriting in order to shrink the most important parts to no more than one page, which he would fold into a waterproof case meant to contain flash drives.

“
You
might find your notes,” he whispered.

He’d tried to shy away from it, but this scenario seemed more and more likely, so he reached for his pen and read out loud in the shadows.

“Your name is Marcus Washington Carver Wolsinger.”

Constant exposure would cause neurological damage like Alzheimer’s disease. It would disrupt his memory, leaving only fragments of his past. He needed some way to hold on to himself, so he wrote his own history.

His voice was soft and trembling:

“You were born on July 21, 1969, a day after a spacecraft called
Apollo 11
brought a man named Neil Armstrong to the moon. He was the first human being to land on another world. None of your professional accomplishments meant as much to your mom, Marilyn. Even twenty years later when she was dying of cancer she liked to brag to you, to her nurses, to other patients, that you had been a moon baby. She made you feel special. She wanted to name you Apollo or Armstrong or Rocket, but your father said those were white names. His name was Ed, which he hated. He wasn’t so proud of you for getting into MIT. He wanted you tougher, better at sports. He made you waste your afternoons throwing balls and running with balls, but he raised you well enough with your sister Korba in Atlanta, Georgia, which is very, very far from here. Too far to walk.”

He choked up. He wasn’t close to his family. He dutifully traded Christmas cards with Korba, and she’d flown out to visit last summer, but he hadn’t seen his father for years and he regretted every minute of it. Worse, he couldn’t deny that he’d hurt his own son as badly as his father had wronged him. He should have been more accepting.

He blamed Janet for Roell’s attitude. She’d bought Roell his iPhone. She let him follow all of the latest hip hop, even the dirty stuff, often sharing downloads and CDs with her son.

Marcus disapproved. He was also jealous. He was still mystified by her. Janet had grown up in the inner city streets of west L.A., underprivileged and undereducated, yet she’d risen to become a full-time paralegal.

Nevertheless, she’d responded to something in Roell’s posturing. She’d encouraged it. Roell’s belligerence appealed to her even when it amounted to nothing more than immature, illogical stubbornness.

Janet was probably dead. Uncontrolled fires must have roasted entire cities alive, and San Francisco had already had its share of brutes and killers before people lost the ability to reason…

She might have been here with him and had some chance at survival if he’d been a better husband.

Survival. No one was going to live to a ripe old age if they were taking as much UV as he suspected. People might have another fifteen, twenty years, then slow and ugly deaths. That matched what he knew of fossil records. In the distant past, no one had grown old. There would be no doctors, no dentists, no optometrists, no police. Even for those lucky few who didn’t develop skin cancer or cataracts, what kind of life would it be?

His mother had eaten a bottle of pills and he’d hated her for it. The doctors had said she had a good chance, but she’d refused to lose her hair or suffer through the cure.

He’d hated Janet for quitting, too.

He wouldn’t give up. He’d never quit in his life, not on his scholarships, not on his Ph.D., and not on his son. But the thought was with
him now. Sooner or later, he would drink the last of his water. Then he would have to go outside.

Would there be waking moments of confusion? That was why he’d written his messages to himself. He would tie the waterproof case to his waist.

What if he removed it in his animal state? Maybe he could carve enough information into his arms to remind himself. There was a box cutter in the tool kit. He could rub ink into his wounds, chancing infection but forcing the cuts to scar.

Or he could open his wrists with it.

Alone in the room, Marcus wept.

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

A
n hour later, Marcus heard shouting outside. He leapt to his feet. Then he had to kneel again, grabbing for a wire rack as his head spun. It was so hot. His stomach rolled, but there wasn’t enough moisture in his system to vomit.

Retching, he climbed the rack and pressed himself against a spy hole.

“Kymmie!” he yelled. “Kym!”

He couldn’t see anyone. He moved to the next hole. A familiar shape scampered through the white dishes. It was Chuck. One of Rebecca’s soldiers ran with him, calling ahead to someone else in a wary tone. Chuck looked over his shoulder once before they passed from view.

“Charles Keen!” Marcus yelled. “Chuck!”

The breeze rustled at the spy hole, taunting him with fresh oxygen and the dusty grass smell of the mountains. Was somebody coming?

“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “There won’t be a helicopter if the pulse is—”

Another man paced into the field. His gait was different, heavier, sturdier, although he didn’t look as if he weighed more than Chuck. He carried a short, bone-smooth branch with its bark removed.

Marcus realized the branch was a weapon and leaned back from his spy hole.

Hide,
he thought, but he was concealed by the wall, so he pressed his eye to the hole again.

The man wasn’t alone. Marcus glimpsed at least three others walking with him in a skirmish line through the stout white dishes. All of them were armed. More disturbing, every man in the battle group carried himself with the same stoop-shouldered pose.

Far across the array, Marcus also thought he saw Roell.

“Ruh,” he said. His throat wouldn’t open. He didn’t want to draw those men into the station, yet he couldn’t let his son pass.

Roell’s obsidian features were unmistakable. Marcus’s heart leapt with shock and joy, but Roell was too far away to guess if he was with the armed men or running from them like Chuck.